May 6, 2015 Photo by: David Sampson. Teklife's DJ Spinn in his studio.
The following story will appear in the forthcoming sixth issue of our print quarterly, The Pitchfork Review—subscribe to the magazine here.
Teklife: Boiler Room Mix [2013] (via SoundCloud)
The basement of DJ Spinn’s childhood home—the house where his mom still lives in Markham, Illinois—isn’t just his lifelong studio. It’s a living museum of footwork, juke, and ghetto house history. Its wood-panelled walls are decked in posters, faded from smoke but still intact, from parties stretching back nearly two decades. His favorite hangs near the staircase: it’s from 1997, his first time playing Chicago’s legendary Bud Billiken parade, the annual late-summer celebration where house music blasts through the city’s Bronzeville neighborhood. Somewhere upstairs, his mom has stored archives of videos from his grade school musicals and clarinet performances.
Along with DJ Rashad, DJ Tre, DJ Manny, and Gant-Man, Spinn is one of the original members of Ghettoteknitianz, the ever-expanding footwork crew that would ultimately rebrand as Teklife in 2010 before proceeding to take over the worldwide dance underground. Every available space in Spinn’s basement studio is crammed with a vast array of mixers, MPCs, samplers, dusty 4-tracks—gear that was shared among the crew for years until they could afford their own. It’s all here, in this inconspicuous basement in the south suburb of Markham. The only thing missing is Rashad.
A couple minutes down the Dixie Highway is Markham Roller Rink, where 10-year-old Spinn, born Morris Harper, learned how to dance and first encountered Rashad Harden, then 11 and already DJing at the rink and on WKKC’s precocious Saturday morning ghetto house showcase, “The Young People’s Network”. “Man, everybody used to be at Markham Roller Rink, that was the spot,” says Spinn, now 34. “Every Saturday they had the disco, and that’s where pretty much all my friends met up.”
For decades Chicago was a premiere city for urban rollerskating culture: There were rinks all over the southside, and a signature style—“JB,” named for the James Brown remixes that often provided the soundtrack—characterized by super-technical footwork routines. Years later, Spinn, Rashad, and Tre would hunt for home-recorded tapes, circulating from rink to rink: Fitness Factory on 87th, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Center on 76th, Glenwood Roller Rink near 195th. “We’d go to every roller rink around town, trying to soak up culture. Oh, they footworking like this over here. That was the club before the club,” Spinn recalls. Some have long since shuttered; Markham, one of the country’s first black-owned rinks, got bought out and renovated by the city in 2012. “There’s not the interest that there used to be,” says Tre. “Times have definitely changed.”
Change has been a constant for the Teklife family in the last handful of years, and for Spinn especially. He’s rarely in the same place for too long these days. He and Rashad embarked with cautious optimism on their first tour abroad in early 2011, around the time of Planet Mu’s Bangs & Works Vol. 1 compilation, which served as footwork’s international debut. They were Teklife’s evangelists, and they were going to make you a believer.
“It was back to baby steps—back to when we first started playing and people was like, What the fuck is this shit?” Spinn laughs. They had their ways: an arsenal of what they called “grease” tracks—guaranteed party pleasers and familiar four-on-the-floor patterns—sandwiched around the raw shit. But it turned out Europe liked the raw shit, the tracks, the stuff these guys were making in each other’s basements to bring to Battle Groundz every Sunday. The uninitiated rarely knew how to dance to it—first-time footwork attempts could sometimes be reminiscent of that cybergoth dance party YouTube video—but they could feel it. Tre had no idea anyone outside of the country knew his music until Rashad reported back from Paris and Belgium: People were shouting his name.
DJ Rashad and DJ Spinn at Brooklyn's 285 Kent on New Year's Eve, 2013. Photo by Erez Avissar.
Spinn and Rashad were soon touring around the world throughout spring and fall, then part of summer, a little winter. Spinn learned from Rashad’s mistakes regarding British immigration: “If you ever need to get into England, just say you’re going to a wedding,” he says, laughing. “I’m cool now, I got a work visa, but back then I had a whole script.” Spinn has stories on stories: he and Rashad, tearing through Europe, Asia, South America, preaching the word of Chicago and having a blast. They were sketching a blueprint for the rest of Teklife to follow, cobbling together a diehard global fanbase—making it up as they went along, but having each other’s backs.
Spinn cracks up remembering their first trip to Kiev, where some kids in the street had clearly never seen a black person before and where, after a successful show, he challenged Rashad to a drinking contest. “I wake up and Rashad is splashing me with this little bucket and throws me some pants. Bro, ya got drunk and pissed your pants on the floor! I said, Whaaat! He said, Bro, we got pictures. But beyond that—you gotta know I love your pussy ass, ‘cause I went and walked in motherfucking 100 degrees to get your ass a pair of pants! And if you don’t know nothing about Kiev, it’s hills—fuck San Francisco, like mountain hills! That’s when I found out whiskey is my demon liquor, and I ain’t never got that drunk again—well, OK, I got that drunk at South by Southwest last year.” Tre nods knowingly: “That was like The Hangover all over again.”
DJ Rashad and DJ Spinn in Austin, Texas during SXSW in March 2014. Photo by Erez Avissar.
But back home, reality set in, always. It was never just about Spinn or Rashad. From day one, the good of the crew at large has trumped any individual measures of success: If they were going to get on, they were going to get on together. You don’t have to look much further than the tracklist of Double Cup, Rashad’s 2013 magnum opus, an album that redefined footwork to the masses as something limitless, nuanced, unprecedentedly smooth. Listed boldly, not in the fine print but as featured artists, are Earl, Taye, Manny, DJ Phil, and Teklife’s Bay Area constituent, Taso; Spinn is featured on eight of the record’s 14 tracks. It was Rashad’s album, but it was everybody’s album—it was a Teklife album.
Some of Teklife’s members are separated in age by more than 10 years. DJ Earl, who started producing at 12 and joined the crew in 2008, is 24 now; Taye, the youngest, is 20. For them, Teklife’s first generation served as big brothers as much as collaborators. Earl and Taye were welcomed into the crew with open arms, from the time they were wide-eyed admirers who’d come to see their icons turn Battle Groundz out every Sunday, watching Rashad run back tracks over and over again at the behest of the dancers. Rashad’s first words to both of them, they recall with a laugh: “How long you been making tracks, bro?” He was the guy who’d made tracks that had changed their perspective on music, and his faith in them gave them confidence in themselves. That sense of mentorship has accompanied the music for as long as Teklife’s existed. On “R House”, a 2011 collaboration between Rashad and Manny, a sample from a 1987 house track, Rhythm Controll’s “My House”, gets flipped to a defiant plural possessive: This is OUR house! “It’s family first—period,” says Spinn emphatically. “You gotta find somebody like you to be like you if you want it to carry on.”
Rashad’s absence carves out a tangible space in Earl’s basement studio, the Double Cup vinyl looming quietly over his computer monitor. Less than two years ago, Rashad was hopping down the stairs on one leg after a serious car accident that forced him to cancel his European fall tour, so he, Earl, and Taye could record “Bombaklot”, their contribution to the Hyperdub 10.1 compilation. You can hear Rashad in little mannerisms shared naturally among the crew: the specific way he’d say “bro,” or the regular invocation of his mantra, “no lacking.” “Sometimes at shows, I just hear his voice in my head, like, Ay dog, you better kill!” says Earl. His voice is still there in vocal samples on tracks spanning decades; the crew preserved troves of his unreleased tracks across their hard drives, flash drives, and mixtapes.
But on April 26, 2014, Rashad was found unresponsive in an apartment on Chicago’s westside, and he died from what was later ruled a drug overdose. After having been denied entry into Canada the night before, he was supposed to meet Spinn in Detroit; they were playing a show with Taye and ghettotech legend DJ Godfather, who had helped Rashad and Spinn coin the “Ghettoteknitianz” moniker a decade prior. Rashad didn’t show up in Detroit that day. The crew would never see him again.
Nobody is exactly sure how to talk about Teklife without Rashad, because that was never supposed to happen.
Spinn had seen Rashad at Markham Roller Rink for a few years, but their official introduction wasn’t until Spinn’s first day of his freshman year at Thornwood High School. They bonded over the boombox in their homeroom class, the resident music dudes. Spinn showed Rashad—already a pretty established DJ for a kid not yet old enough to drive—some mixes he’d made from meticulously blending specific sections of other people’s mixtapes together with a setup he’d concocted from his mom’s entertainment system. When Rashad revealed he had turntables at his house, Spinn’s world truly came to life. He laughs remembering his first time visiting Rashad’s place, his mind blown by the two-channel mixer and drum machine, before finding out Rashad was grounded when his dad came home early and Rashad tried to hide behind the refrigerator.
The pair held dance practice on a daily basis, and Rashad showed Spinn how to use turntables and make beats. Everyone was broke; if you had gear, you shared it with your friends. Tre brought around his MPC for years until Spinn could afford his own; DJ Malcolm had a bunch of MIDI keyboards; they’d ditch school to come through and mess with them. “We ain’t know what we was doing,” says Spinn. “We just knew that if we could say bitch and muthafucka and put it in keys—oh, it was over! We was having fun, we just wanted to be young and do something.”
Rashad and Spinn in Monterrey, Mexico in March 2014. Photo by Erez Avissar.
They idolized ghetto house heroes DJ Milton and DJ Deeon, guys who were throwing parties in the projects, where Rashad, Spinn, and Tre, three dudes from the suburbs, stuck out like sore thumbs. They joined the prestigious House-O-Matics dance crew, a name shouted out constantly in ghetto house tracks throughout the ‘90s and beyond, and were introduced to DJ Clent and RP Boo, who—along with Traxman—comprise footwork’s holy trinity. Boo played them some tracks he’d been working on that left their heads spinning. Rashad and Spinn started testing out their own tracks, but only when they were sure they were cold enough. The dancers apprised the DJs about what made them go off, which informed the tracks—a cycle that sped the evolution of the sound. Rashad and Spinn DJed now-legendary parties at the Elks Lodge on 51st and Prairie thrown by the Gangster Disciples, though all gangs were welcome. As long as no one broke the peace, no one got their ass beat. “We always had these stupid little hurdles: Oh, you not from the city, you from the ’burbs, I’m from 79th, you from Markham, you know, the same stuff that go on today. But these were the proving grounds—there wasn’t no MySpace, you actually had to go to these places to make your name.”
DJ Spinn and DJ Rashad: Track Factory Juke/Footwork Mix [2004] (via SoundCloud)
Making a name: The concept is central to so much of Chicago music history, especially music that comes from the city’s consistently broken south and west sides. If there’s a persistent fallacy about the city, it’s that there is a unified Chicago identity its residents can claim en masse. But Chicago is fractured, geographically, socioeconomically, spiritually. In many ways, it’s a city disowned from its own realities: It’s white kids who’ve never had a reason to venture farther south on the Red Line than Sox–35th giddily hollering “Chiraq!” And if Chicago doesn’t give a fuck about you, it doesn’t pretend to. It produces brilliance, but doesn’t have the infrastructure to support it. If you want to do something special, you will have to do it yourself with whatever is at your disposal. Even a coveted Kanye co-sign is hardly a guarantee. There’s an air of cool resignation here: This is how things are, this is how they will always be. Success here puts a target on your back; when you get some money, you move on to greener coasts. So it goes.
Even today, some parts of the city are functionally invisible to others. It’s been that way for the better part of a century, since the Great Migration established Chicago’s black and immigrant working class and multiplied the city’s black population fivefold. The Chicago Housing Authority grew increasingly restrictive, squeezing the majority of its new black citizens into an overcrowded stretch of slums along State between 18th and 39th known as the Black Belt. Chicago blues emerged as a voice of overworked, underpaid black creatives tired of being relegated less and less space. “I’m gonna tell you what the blues is: When you ain’t got no money, you got the blues,” Howlin’ Wolf said to preface a 1966 performance of “How Many More Years”. Decades later, the 1979 Comiskey Park Disco Demolition Night made it clear that the city’s loudest and most visible demographic didn’t have room for music that wasn’t straight, white, rock ‘n roll; that same year, the Warehouse—where house music was in its nascence—made room.
Ghetto house was a shout from the country’s most extreme public housing redevelopment project, constructed by the CHA when it was convenient and then torn down when it wasn’t; maybe the city wanted to pretend like its less-inviting neighborhoods didn’t exist, but tracks like Parris Mitchell’s 1995 anthem “Ghetto Shout Out!!” wrote these places back into Chicago’s history. And yet, there’s a sense of dissociation that doesn’t seem to go away. There are stretches of Chicago full of people who have, in all likelihood, never heard a footwork track in their life, completely cut off from the genius coming out of their own city.
Footwork as a culture rests on that foundation, and in all its complexities, it reflects the sometimes contradictory nature of its hometown. It’s technical but resourceful, reality-grounded but avant-garde, community-oriented yet competitive, globally scalable but Chicago to the core. It’s a positive legacy left by a city that never did shit for you, but remains a part of you all the same.
“I’m Chicago all day because this is my life. It’s the place that made me,” says Spinn. “That’s always been important to us: namesake. To leave your mark. That’s just the school we come from, the old school. People nowadays, they’ll skirmish their name up just to get a dollar. Nah, man—I ain’t about to compromise my integrity and how I feel on the inside about myself for nothing. Ain’t nothing like respect.” In the case of Teklife, that legacy is a mark that could not have been made alone.
By 2013, Teklife’s presence was solidly established in Chicago and was extending exponentially worldwide. Rashad and Spinn were touring half the year, returning with a redoubled seriousness each time. Earl, Taye, Tre, Manny, and the rest of the quickly expanding crew were starting to get national and international bookings themselves, armed with flash drives full of straight heat lent from Rashad with love. New to the roster, Taso invited Rashad and Spinn to San Francisco to track out for the winter. They began working on the batch of tracks that would ultimately lead to Double Cup in a window-filled studio overlooking the Bay, all the way out to Oakland—and the tracks were magical.
“We was smoking so much fucking weed, getting all fucked up,” Spinn says, laughing. “I felt like I was floating on a cloud—looking out the window, feeling like we was flying! And it was just like, This the direction right here.” Their signature triplet patterns (established well before EDM-trap made them trendy) were countered with a half-time, West Coast–inspired pace. “It was versatility, showing all the different angles of footwork and the influences they picked up over the years from traveling,” says Earl. “And it was a statement that footwork is not what the media was making it out to be—hardcore, or unproduced, or over-produced, or whatever. It was dope producers from Chicago pushing this culture, and this was just one way to do it.”
Double Cup was a game-changer. It was footwork like the world had never heard it before: an album in the truest sense, in a genre that had often felt too ephemeral for the format. It was footwork you could wash dishes to, footwork you could make-out to, footwork that could charm the most conservative of ears. It thrashed and bucked: I don’t give a fuck about you, I don’t give a fuck about myself, a Juice sample spat on “I Don’t Give a Fuck”, hi-hats spraying like gunfire. It swooned: On “Let U No”, a breathless Floetry sample felt lightheaded and swirling like a drunken first kiss. Mostly, it soared.
The album cover was no coincidence: a jet’s-eye view of Chicago’s golden-orange, sodium vapor–lit grid—the broken city blurring together, for the moment, into a glowing, triumphant composite. And though this music was unmistakably Chicago, it invited the world to join, with a generousness the city rarely shows its own people. To hear the flushed, syrupy Rhodes stabs of “Feelin” blasting out of sweaty Brooklyn warehouses was its own triumph: snobby East Coast hipsters losing their collective shit to the sounds of a black Midwestern avant-garde that had long gone uncelebrated but kept going anyway. It was a win for a city in serious need of a win, and for a dude who more than deserved it.
Two-thousand fourteen was going to be Teklife’s year—not just for its primary ambassadors Rashad and Spinn, but for the entire crew. They destroyed SXSW, playing more than 20 shows. “We were just toasting to success,” says Tre. “We had a ball, and I knew everything was going to be huge from that point forward. I would just think of the days when we would be in Spinn’s house for hours, up all night just making tracks—all that work is starting to pay off.”
Earl and Taye were both in the midst of prolific streaks, establishing themselves as promising voices of Teklife’s second generation. Spinn and Manny went back out to the West Coast. Rashad was bouncing around, touring Japan in January, coming home for a day or two, heading off to South America. Still, he was in constant contact with the rest of the crew. Tre remembers Rashad Skyping him for hours from Brazil, talking about how they were finally in the positions for their sons to be set. “When he got back, he was super tired, you could just hear it in his voice,” says Spinn. “I was like, Bro, I think you should get some sleep, and he was like, Nah man, I’m good, I got shit to do. We had a little bit of time before we went on tour together, and I ain’t think nothing of anything, it was all good.”
Rashad couldn’t get into Canada, so Spinn went on ahead. They planned to meet in Detroit for the next day’s show. Spinn didn’t know Rashad was heading back to Chicago first; their last conversation was about customs. The next day Spinn took a train from Toronto to Detroit, anticipating that he’d meet Rashad there; his phone didn’t work in Canada. Boylan, another Teklife member and a science teacher at Rashad and Spinn’s old high school, finally got through. Spinn knew it was going to be about Rashad. “He got on FaceTime and told me what he thought was going on, and I’m on the train trying not to freak out and cuss him out. What are you telling me, bro? Where is Rashad right now? You telling me what you think is going on, but until I know somebody seen him and can tell me this is what this is…”
Earl was at home, having woken up with a strange feeling. Then he got the call. “I couldn’t even think straight,” he remembers. “I called Spinn, and he was in transit to go meet Taye. And then Taye called me like, Bro, please don’t tell me this is real. And that was one of the most painful moments of my life.”
In Detroit, the promoters were planning to cancel the show, but Spinn declined. He didn’t want to sit in his hotel room in silence, he wanted to play some fucking tracks. “Looking at Taye in his eyes, the young dude, how he was looking—I know he needed this too,” he says. “I couldn’t fucking digest it at the time. Because I didn’t get to see him. And I never got to see him again.” Rashad’s family opted not to have a funeral.
That night went… well, it’s hard to say. Taye’s voice shrinks to barely a whisper revisiting it. They got through the show. If the crowd hadn’t known about Rashad when they got there, they knew when they left. DJ Godfather picked them up afterward and they talked for a while. “It was a lot of love in Detroit,” Spinn recalls. “Everybody was feeling this shit. And through the somberness of it all, I was smiling on the inside a little bit.” But everything had changed.
Spinn in his basement studio in the Chicago suburbs. Photo by David Sampson.
For a while, nobody made tracks. It wasn’t even an option. “Everything I ever learned from Rashad hit me at the same time,” says Earl. “You hit the studio and gather your thoughts, and I sat down and I was so overtaken, I couldn’t even remember how to make tracks. I’m serious. I sat down and was like, How do I do this without Rashad?” Spinn couldn’t think about it either: “Fuck that shit, I didn’t know what to make a track about after that. You know, we get fucked up and we have a good time and we give you an instruction book to have a fuckin’ great time.”
Rashad’s autopsy results were inconclusive for months. Ultimately, the cause of death was ruled an accidental overdose, with the toxicology reports citing heroin, cocaine, and alprazolam (Xanax) intoxication. Spinn maintains that it wasn’t until shortly before Rashad’s death that anyone had much of an idea that he was using hard drugs. “Things started adding up,” says Spinn. “Behavior. Being real sleepy. Never coming ‘round—or how he was being a little different when he did, a little weird.” For months, Spinn wrote it off because of all the touring and late nights and gigs; he was fatigued and near exhaustion himself. But now he realizes that he was just too close to see it: “I was with him every single day.”
News of Rashad’s death rocked Chicago and beyond, in every city that had ever been blessed with a DJ set from the Teklife ambassador. Anyone tangentially involved in dance music had a Rashad story. The night after his death, I heard “I’m Gone”, a highlight off his 2011 album Just a Taste, ring out across an unusually somber Bushwick club, with its heartbroken Gil Scott-Heron sample: “I left three days ago, but no one seems to know I’m gone.”
DJ Rashad: "I'm Gone" (via SoundCloud)
Tributes sprang up across the world: a Boiler Room homage in London with sets from his close friends and collaborators at Hyperdub, heartfelt written remembrances from DJs and music lovers worldwide, endless memorial mixes. But Rashad’s death was felt nowhere sharper than in Chicago: His loss was the city’s loss. April had been ushered in cruelly with the death of Frankie Knuckles, the godfather of house, a true pioneer who’d remained active in Chicago’s dance music scene for more than 30 years. Losing Frankie meant losing one of the most essential parts of Chicago’s cultural history. But losing Rashad, somehow, cut deeper. Even with all he’d achieved, it was painfully obvious we’d only gotten a glimpse of his brilliance.
Months later, out in California with Taso, Spinn heard a song playing on CVS’ speakers and immediately knew it was Rashad talking to him. It was a sample he’d never placed before, from an old Rashad track called “Burn That Bitch”. He went back to the studio and flipped the same sample as a tribute. The track would eventually become Spinn’s contribution to Next Life, the Teklife compilation-cum-memorial released in late 2014 on Hyperdub, the proceeds of which go to Rashad’s son Chad. Spinn and Earl had a talk—“a very real talk,” Earl recalls. “And he said, You know what Rashad would say if he was here: Man, what y’all sad for? Keep making the music, no lacking, just keep going and make sure Teklife is where it needs to be. It’s the message that he’s instilled in all of us, and because he’s not here, we want to be that spirit.” For the first time in Spinn’s adult life, he was making music without Rashad as his other half.
Rashad and Spinn in Monterrey, Mexico in March 2014. Photo by Erez Avissar.
Less than three months later, almost like a condolence from the universe, Spinn became a dad. His girl asked him to choose a name. “I remember having this little disagreement with Rashad before he passed—mostly I had to question him about some drug shit—and he opened up to me about some shit that I didn’t know about,” says Spinn. “He asked me: After this shit, man, am I still the godfather of your son? And I’m like, What? Bro, shut the fuck up, that’s a dumb-ass question. After he passed, that moment kept playing back in my head. And that’s the moment I knew.”
Rashad Harper was born on July 14, 2014. Chad, who just turned 10, adores him. “Man, he couldn’t wait to meet my son, that shit was adorable,” Spinn smiles. “They got to be friends one day, that’s just inevitable. They got an age difference, but shit, that’s the little homie.” Spinn still needs to drop off Chad’s birthday gift, since he’s been out of town for so long. “All he wanna do is make music, so I gotta go get him this drum machine from Gant. He’s got Rashad’s old drum machine.” Chad is now the same age Rashad was when he started to DJ.
DJ Spinn. Photo by David Sampson.
Life has gone on because it’s had to. Earl and Taye traveled to Seoul this winter, following the trail Rashad and Spinn blazed—they can’t get enough of footwork in Asia, dancing and all. They’re both in grind mode, prepping for their respective debut albums. Tre’s putting the finishing touches on his next EP, The Underdog, along with a split EP with Earl. A Teklife-produced rap album—Live From Yo Momma’s House, in collaboration with Treated Crew’s Mic Terror—is in the works for later this year. They’re working out how to more thoroughly incorporate footwork dancing into their live shows, something Rashad had been advocating for a while.
Their work ethic has been keen for years, but their mindset is sharper now that both Teklife’s legacy and Rashad’s rest with them. They all still feel his presence: “When I make music, I do it as if he was sitting here listening,” says Taye. “I do it with everything he taught me. He lives with us.” Rashad’s influence on Teklife’s second generation isn’t just musical; his example helped shape Earl and Taye into the driven, positive, and deeply loyal adults they have become. “My life would not be the same without him,” says Earl. “Rashad always put everybody before him. He was for everybody. As long as you were positive and living to your fullest potential, he was willing to help you out. We want to be that spirit that carries on his message.”
Spinn doesn’t really like talking about DJ Spinn, singular. “Oh, I’m DJ Spinn, and this the DJ Spinn show—nah, I don’t really even like to say my name that much, it’s weird,” he admits. “You know who I am—it’s a Teklife show.” But he is now Teklife’s most prominent ambassador, a spotlight he is learning to stand in without his lifelong foil beside him. His first official solo release since Rashad passed, an EP called Off That Loud—which includes a track featuring Rashad and Danny Brown—will be released on Hyperdub this summer, along with a collaborative release with Canadian artist Jessy Lanza; his debut full-length on Hyperdub is due out later in the year. The snippets he previews, filling every wood-paneled corner of his mom’s basement, are transcendent. There’s live instrumentation from Spinn’s cousin, drifting organically before coalescing into an impossibly detailed beat. Another track features breathtaking vocals from house-pop singer Kiesza that sounds like a visitation from Aaliyah’s ghost; it’s 160 BPM but barely registers as footwork at all until, suddenly, it hits you. The album is the next chapter in Teklife’s history.
Spinn bears the weight of Rashad’s absence with almost startling grace. He is generous with his memories of his best friend and almost always punctuates them with laughter and deep-drawling Rashad impressions. In these memories the two often blur together into one person, picking up where the other left off; when Rashad would fall asleep at the MPC—as he did regularly—Spinn would keep working ahead. People don’t really do groups anymore, Spinn notes, especially not in Chicago. “People break up and carry on, fight over stupid shit,” he notes. “Rashad was the most loyal person I knew. He was real. You might not like everything he did—we argued, that was me and him! I needed that rough-edged cat around me. He was never out here to betray nobody. He was always a real friend, even to people that weren’t real friends to him. He was loyal, and generous like a motherfucker. He was a part of my whole life.”
This story will appear in the forthcoming sixth issue of our print quarterly, The Pitchfork Review—subscribe to the magazine here.
